McMeddon Progression Report (Patreon)

Hellou dear square enjoyers :)
Been a while since the last time and honestly it feels like yesterday when i did the last posts and world. I swear i blink once and a whole week can go by, atleast thats what it feels like.

Note: Thumbnail-final at the blog end :)

Let me try keep everything short, and give you a overview of whats happening all around + plenty of ✨images✨ :

2026 the worst and best year?

• Worst? Yea in terms of mc progression and this huge release hole, giant creative blocks and mental droughts, the guilt weights to prove being worthy of your support, are heavy this year.

• The best okay-ish? Trying to uphold a positive spin - i guess with the absence in minecraft itself, i was able to put time into projects i had planned/thought of for months/years, and its all coming slowly together, which im very happy about.

Me:

• Health: good, recovered from a sick-phase a while ago, but still hella sleepy nonstop. So daily energy feels like half? Idk. The whole summer in general.. with its endless 40°C+ was just unbearable and turned into.. lets just survive this until it gets normal again.

• Mental health: Ngl... stressed, anxious, angry and energy deprived to the max. Its really hard to get into "creative flow states" in such times, and if i reach them, they feel like instantly depleted. Hence the lack of or very slow world progression
  

Anyways, Whats next?

26.3 will be the next longterm version i will base my worlds of, until a major overworld change/addition is done again by Mojang.

• The current world workflow is based on 1.21.5, and im waiting till all my main mods (we/axiom/dh/iris etc) are updated to 26.3.

• I will try to do/upload the next few worlds with a 1.21 and a 26.3 java world. But for Data simplicity i would like to keep/do one version. To be fair, i have no clue, how many of you go ahead download a "1.21" world, and then downgrade to 1.12 (extreme example) - cant be that many, right? Longterm 26.3 is the go-to then.

Next stuff in super-short

• preparation for 26.3

• new Swamps biomes

• Beach improves and structures

• Ancient city structures

• Biome related surface structures for strongholds

• Dappled forests

Next: New Swamps in progression

turning into /adding various swamp sub types like Flooded forestplains, bogs, marshes/fens and moving them inland. (currently mainly at the coast, but thats the mangroves job already).

Checked in worldmachine, the foundation is set, but still needs more work to get these biomes working and interconnected, with rivers, basins, floodplains, climatezones etc.

New Beach structures

After the revelations of the new world analytics not finding propper beach loot on most worlds, i turned my focus onto new beach structures, which will be biome specific and fitting to the locations ( sandy, muddy, rocky, gravely etc). Originally i had such a "restplace under palms" but it basically never got placed - so stupid. Anyway new beach stuff soon.

(vague image to not spoil it all)

Future trial chambers are now fixed.

A lifetime nbt setting got stuck and never updated, locking all existing exported ones. I created a fixer/hotfix for your worlds: https://mcmeddon.com/tools/vault-fixer

Working on improvements end expansions to the Mineshafts

Worked mostly well on Agontorm, but needs apparently some fixing.

Dappled forest.. in preparations

Not much, im still preparing and experimenting - my asset world is still in 1.21.5 - basing of the birch forest and going for real world poplar appearances.

Sulfur caves?

Coming but mainly as default vanilla caves - tbh i have no vision yet for it.

Next Next: The ancient cities need finally a propper implementation

currently chests are scattered as a fallback in deep dark biomes so loot is possible, but this fallback solution is now used for like 1-2 years already x_x time to finally tackle that.

Just a quick reminder; its just me doing it all; build, create, combine, picture, render, organize etc.

What else been worked on?

Well with all the mc additions aside, here are the other things i worked on:

• Local Worldpainter improvements

• Java to Bedrock convertion pipeline tools

• Website and optimizations : mcmmeddon.com
  The website is basically where most time currently goes into.

• - Better world analyzers

• - The 3d world viewers

• - 3D roundtables

Round tables for all worlds~

The conversion pipelines

A while ago i had updated and filled all outstanding worlds with final bedrock versions thanks to my new conversion tools, that now auto load, preload, save, then convert then via chunker, and save properly the bedrock conversion reducing a process from 100-120min+ down to a few 2-10+ minutes.

The world analyzer on the project pages on mcmeddon.com

Trying to give better / more information about the worlds, whats in them, what you can expect.

What, how, %, composition..
Biomes, caves, structures, loot.

More marked worlds

Been also progressing on adding manually more markers to every world crucial locations and structures. But theres still many worlds left out to be done. But i have added indicots for incomplete worlds. Ngl, Finding 50-300 objects/structures on a world visually by looking for various pixels is.. hard - some are found by structure composition or special blocks via mca or chunk analysis, but a large part still is manually derived for everything custom.

Worldpainter tools, hotkeys and local fixes

Mega-Mega niche issue, if you have in worldpainter like 200-300+ brushes loaded, the previews took like 30-40s and longer to load. Redid the implementation and view and now it only takes 500ms + a better list view, to see the names of what im selecting.

+ then also added new hotkeys to adjust brush sizes and placements

Experimental:

I also worked on a addon to add newer 3d noise caves. Which worked okay, kinda lacking the zass and glammer yet. But pretty capable so far, but still a WIP .

Only issue is, worldpainter files could not be shared then with those new custom layers since they are not in the vanilla Worldpainter. So im hesitent to use them for official worlds. Because i want to share the worldpainter files, so you have the option and the possibility to fix or change worlds in the future. Idk, just a big fan of Right to Repair.

Offtopic stuff:

Figured that i could optimize my system further, to better utilize java and worldpainter, which resulted in some nice performance gains for rendering for me: from 20min down to 17min

The last thing, i got more into was digital painting - that was indeed fun!

The End

As soon as i hit publish, i probably will remember all the small stuff i forgot about to add.. #classic.

In anycase..
Thank you all for your support, i am grateful beyond words!
I hope this gave some insights about the progression behind the scenes.
Maps are in the works, and soon coming your way!

And also: Heres the final image i made (over i think it was like 16h) ^_^

~McMeddon